The Death of Literature

[Russell Nash]

After reading ten pages of Imre Kertész’s novel: “Kadish for an unborn child”, I stopped and wondered who can read this … (followed by an insult). I also tried to find online reviews, after long time of refusing to read reviews, to see whether others shared my viewpoint or I was mistaken, and this novel was written for a much more advanced or intelligent person. Wasn’t it written by a Nobel Prize winner after all? So I found that this novel was written using the old technique of “Stream of Consciousness”. And, those 10 pages left nothing on me, absolutely nothing. I asked myself what I always do when I come across “experimental” literature. Why should someone read me? When there are so many people that still didn’t read the best works by Saramago, Hesse, Borges, to name a few, or like me, who didn’t read Joyce, or Proust yet, most probably because I’m lazy, why should someone read me? I always say that I have something new to say, but then I think about this word: “new”, new? Do I have something new to say? It would be plain vanity. Then I think, if I could retrace my steps a few years, if I could talk to an imaginary reader, I’d say aloud: do not read me! Read others! Read those who generation after generation are read, the ones that make one think, cry, be happy, so many readers over the decades or centuries. Just to mention Giovanni Papini, writer that has 15 stories that I should envy those who didn’t read them yet. Where are those writers now? Writers like Papini, Oscar Wilde, Marcel Schwob, and others. Then I keep asking myself, why don’t I go back and read again books by Poe, Lovecraft, Hope Hodgson? Do I remember them that much that I cannot read them again and enjoy their literature as if it were the very first time? Why should I waste my time with Kertész (sorry to offend a Nobel Prize winner)? I always leaf through uncountable pages of rubbish looking for something new, something that I will say: finally, the story, or novel, that justifies my existence, but I cannot find it. Why should someone like me who didn’t read Marcel Proust yet (seven books that I always wish to read but I didn’t), should not finally read his works? Or Joyce, of whom I heard so many interesting (what a word!) things? Why should I spend more time writing when I know that what I have to say was already said? Why should I bother reading anybody but the best writers of the world? Why don’t I finish that thick book of Pushkin’s complete works? Why should I not read Lovecraft’s stories once more? Why shouldn’t I read Borges once more? Why not? Why do you yield to temptation to buy more books, more, more, more (greedy society)… when everything already has been said, and written, and thought? Just to mention Ligotti, why shouldn’t I read the rest of his stories I didn’t read, or read them again, and again? I used to read Khalil Gibran’s “Prophet” when I was a kid, how many times did I read this book? Many. It inspired me, made me love literature, poetry, life. It made me wonder. That’s the missing word, “wonder”. Just look around you, see that big book by Nabokov, read it. When you finish it, read it again, I told myself. It is not that I am a monster that has become pessimistic, sarcastic, nihilistic, devoid of any emotion, it is precisely the opposite, I want to read, I love reading, but what? Literature that has become after so many years, a job, a means of making money? A regular job like making aspirins. Other than art? And I go back to my shelves, and I look at the titles, and the names of the writers, vainly hoping that someone or something is going to make me feel again, alive, like when I saw the sky for the first time full of distorted stars (I am nearsighted) and wanted to be an astronomer. Which book should I pick tonight…?